Short Stories About Cities: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories about city life, from The Overcoat and Bartleby to The Furnished Room and Araby, summarised and compared, with the craft each teaches a writer.
City stories are read by city people who want their streets to mean something, and the short story is the form the modern city produced for itself: one person, one room, one evening among millions. The writers here worked in Petersburg, New York, Dublin and London, and agreed that the city notices nobody.
The collection begins in Gogol's Petersburg, crosses to O. Henry's Manhattan, and ends with a Dublin bazaar and a London opium den. Each title links to a page that summarises the story and explains its ending.
The stories
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol. A Petersburg copying clerk saves for a new coat through a whole winter and is robbed of it on a vast empty square the night he first wears it out. The city's officials, from the watchman to the Important Person, decline to help.
The Nose by Nikolai Gogol. A barber finds a nose in his morning bread, and across town Major Kovalyov wakes without one. The nose is later seen praying in the Kazan Cathedral in the uniform of a state councillor, outranking its owner.
White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A young man who knows every house in Petersburg and nobody in it meets a weeping girl on a canal embankment during the pale summer nights. They walk and talk for four nights; on the fifth the city goes back to being empty.
The Furnished Room by O. Henry. A young man works his way through the rooming houses of the lower West Side asking each landlady about a girl who sang, and rents a room where the furniture has been scarred by a thousand tenants. He smells mignonette.
The Cop and the Anthem by O. Henry. Soapy, on his Madison Square bench, feels the dead leaf fall that means winter and sets out to be arrested. The city refuses him six times, and then obliges when he has changed his mind.
The Green Door by O. Henry. A piano salesman who believes in adventure is handed a card in Broadway that reads The Green Door, and finds the door on the third floor of the building behind. There is a starving girl inside and a very different explanation in the street.
A Municipal Report by O. Henry. A writer sent to Nashville to sign a contract with a reclusive poet meets a cabman in a coat with one button and a gentleman who drinks on credit. It is a rebuttal to anyone who thinks nothing happens in Nashville.
Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville. A Wall Street lawyer's office looks out on a brick wall, and into it comes a pale copyist who will do less and less until he does nothing. The lawyer moves his whole practice to escape him.
Araby by James Joyce. A boy in North Richmond Street carries his love for a neighbour's sister through the Saturday market crowds and, one evening, across Dublin by train to a bazaar that is closing. The hall is dark when he arrives.
The Man with the Twisted Lip by Arthur Conan Doyle. Watson goes into an opium den in Upper Swandam Lane to fetch a patient home and finds Holmes there in disguise. A respectable man from Kent has vanished from a room above the den, where a scarred beggar was seen.
Reading them together
The collection's argument is that the city is an engine for turning people into functions: clerk, copyist, tenant, beggar. Gogol and Melville show the engine from inside the office; O. Henry shows it from the bench and the rooming house, and gives his people the small mercy of coincidence. Joyce and Dostoevsky are the ones who let a young man walk the whole city and arrive nowhere.
The Nose and The Man with the Twisted Lip make an odd pair: both are about a respectable man's face going missing in a city, and one writer treats it as farce while the other treats it as a case.
If you want to write about cities
What writers can take from this
- Read The Overcoat and Bartleby together; they are the two great office stories and were written twelve years apart.
- O. Henry has four entries here; read them in one sitting to see how a city can be kind in fiction.
- White Nights and Araby are both about a young man walking; note how the light differs.
- The Nose is best read fast and without trying to explain it.
- In The Man with the Twisted Lip, watch how much of London Doyle shows before the puzzle starts.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character walks a city they know completely, looking for one person, and every door they knock on is opened by someone who has never heard the name.
Questions
What is the best short story about city life?
The Overcoat is the standard, and Bartleby, the Scrivener the American answer. Araby is the most taught, and The Furnished Room the most atmospheric.
Which city short stories are good for students?
Araby, The Cop and the Anthem, The Furnished Room and The Man with the Twisted Lip are short and clear. The Overcoat and Bartleby suit longer study.
Which classic city story is the shortest?
The Cop and the Anthem and The Green Door are each around two thousand words. Araby is roughly the same.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory story contest
Enter the Writory Short Story Contest and have your own story read and scored out of 100. Entries close 25 November. That first entry makes you a Writorian.